Meet Your Maker: How the Fork Changed the Way We Bite

Besides your ancestors, you may also have to thank the fork for your jawline. It turns out the eating utensil could be responsible for ensuring that our “top layer of teeth fits over the bottom layer like a lid on a box.” The Atlantic‘s interview with Bee Wilson, author of Consider the Fork, delves into some of the ways forks and pots have left an indelible mark on our anatomy.

About 250 years ago, we started eating with forks and knives at the table, eliminating the need for the unreliable “stuff-and-cut” technique (a manner of eating chewy edibles by stuffing them into our faces and reducing them down to size with sharp objects or our hands). The introduction of forks and knives as a practical duo “meant that we were cutting chewy food into small morsels before eating it.” In China, humans were already 900 years into developing their overbite with the help of chopsticks, according to Wilson.